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Friday

Welcome to The Corner Cafe Blog Book Tour!

Join us for the latest wild and crazy experiment at the BBT Café, the online social group for all the writers who have taken my blog book
tours classes over the past few years! This community of about 100 authors
supports each other’s writing efforts through daily social media interaction, blog book tours, and by sharing information and conversation as the publishing world
changes. And, boy, is it ever changing fast!

In the past few years, the opportunities for self-publishing
have burgeoned, and the stigma attached is virtually non-existent. Only an Old
Publishing School dinosaur would think of self-publishing as an inferior option. Programs
like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing have leveled the playing field, and more
authors are jumping into the game every day.

This fertile publishing ground is what inspired The Corner
Café short story collection. We noticed that authors were starting to give away samples and old titles in e-book format, and that it resulted in increased
sales on their other titles. Even a free day or two tended to increase sales when the regular price of a title came back.

Without too much forethought about what we were stumbling into, we
decided to put together a collection of our very own around a common theme: The
Corner Café. The object was for readers to sample various writing styles, and
tempt them to link to other works by the contributing authors. We’d promote the new
project via a month-long blog book tour (what else?), and track sales each day,
as well as measure download bumps the five free days allowed by the KDP Select
program. (Seth Godin suggests free is a good marketing strategy in publishing. Here’s his post about it.) So we’re putting it to the test. That’s the short version
of how it all came about over the past four months. You can get more gory details at the various blogs
listed below throughout June.

Let me tell you a little bit about the book’s content.
Here’s the description on Amazon:

These are just a few of the teasers each author submitted for their
respective stories:

In The Catfish Enchantment by Marian Allen: Cosmo’s father
deserted the family and died unforgiven, his mother is sinking into depression,
he’s started cutting himself to relieve the pain, and his boss suggests…a
tattoo?

In The Eyes Have It by W.S. Gager: Crimebeat reporter Mitch
Malone hates going to church, but when he gets rooked into speaking to the
Bible-toting ladies, he may be facing the devil himself as he investigates the
prayer group's missing purses.

In The Consequences of Breaking and Entering by Audrey
Lintner, Goldilocks gets an update and her comeuppance.

We hope you join us each day to read more about how The Corner Cafe: A Tasty Collection of Short Stories evolved. For those of you out there who know little
about how a blog book tour works, a great way to get an education is to follow
along on a tour. You'll get lots of ideas for your own blog book tour. Join us and do leave questions and comments here!